At leisure is the Soul
by jomiddlemarch
Summary: On holiday.


He had imagined having to raise an eyebrow, even make some comment about the beauty of silence or how one could appreciate the birdsong better without any human competition, but Sam was quiet as they cast and the sound around them was only the water and the line snapping the air before the fly sank in the river. Andrew had always accompanied him with a poorly concealed dutifulness that was at odds with his lively temperament and Rosalind had never ventured to fish, preferring to set up her sturdy plein-air easel on the grassy or mossy bank and paint whatever captured her eye—a collection of clouds behind trees, the way the shadows lay over the far hills. She never painted figures in her landscapes and Foyle had never divined what that meant.

Sam made a fine fisherman. She wore her wellies and waders un-self-consciously and she'd tied her hair back before jamming an old cap on her head, though the tail peeked out like a golden tassel. He found himself admiring the way she narrowed her eyes against the sun and the precise angle she held her chin and her wrist. She let the rod rest in the crook of her arm the way another woman would hold an expensive leather hand-bag. When she caught something, she unhooked it neatly and only grinned if the fish tried to slap its way out of her hands back to its previous life. She did not make any other overtures to conversation and he found himself speaking first, clearly startling her a little.

"Should've done this before. A pity."

She tilted her head and flicked her wrist, making her line shiver back into the place she wanted it to be. He surmised as much from the small smile she gave.

"Don't see how we could have. Would we have stopped off in between murders for a spot of fishing? Can you imagine what people would have said?" Sam chuckled, a low, throaty sound that would not disturb any creature nearby except for Foyle. He had thought he'd sized her up from the start but it was a curious pleasure to realize he was wrong.

"Andrew never liked this. Too dull," he remarked, not addressing the world she had recalled, where she was his uniformed driver and he her superior, their friendship nascent as roe, elusive though present like the trout in the stream.

"My uncle taught me," Sam offered.

"Aubrey?" he asked, seeing a cassock on a river-bank and a small, pig-tailed Sam charging about, the rod half-again as long as she was tall.

"No, Uncle Michael. Though, he's a vicar as well. He was a good teacher but my, he chattered the whole time, mostly about whatever was happening in his parish and his next sermon. He was terribly fond of Proverbs. He'd been sort of forced into the Church, wanted to work for a newspaper," Sam said.

"This is nice," she added, after several more minutes of silence. The fish weren't biting well but Foyle wasn't bothered.

"Mmm," he murmured, to see what she would say next.

"It used to drive me to distraction, how you wouldn't say anything or just the littlest bit when we were going places. But now, it's nice, just being quiet, thinking. It's…companionable," she explained.

"A lot on your mind then?" he asked.

"I suppose so, though it mightn't be much for someone else. Just, I hadn't thought happiness would require such an…adjustment," she said. She and Andrew had made their way back to each other, struggling in ways he was only dimly aware of, as it should be, and now were settling into a young married life that was familiar and foreign all at once. Foyle recognized the form of the transition, the larger alteration asked of the woman, the greater demand on the wife of the traumatized veteran, and he wished, for the first time on Sam's behalf, that Rosalind were here now or rather waiting at home with tea, busy in her studio but not too busy to talk with her new daughter-in-law when they returned home. She wasn't and so it fell to him, a burden he had not known he would want so much to carry.

"Nor did I," he replied.

"Oh, I didn't mean to remind you, I didn't mean to be insensitive," she stumbled, the Sam he remembered so well, her cheeks flushed and those bright eyes anxious.

"I meant now, Sam. Then too, but I meant now," he said and watched her face transformed with a smile. It was not the one she gave Andrew that stopped his hands from shaking, it was one she saved for him, when she trusted he would respond in kind. And so he would have, had the catch of the day not bitten at the moment, drawing from him a grunt and from Sam a laugh that made the sparrows leave the woods.


End file.
